On fanciful ideas

Reflections over the kitchen sink

By Moristotle

Spellbound at its revelations, my wife and I have been watching Ken Burns’s Vietnam War. Watching it is tearing at my heart, and hers too, I think. The war’s stupidity, our leaders’ pathological need to “save face,” the hundreds of thousands of deaths, square miles of beautiful land burned and bombed, the angst of soldiers, their families, their fellow citizens torn asunder by opposed stances on the war….

    At breakfast yesterday morning, I said to my wife, “My favorite character in The Vietnam War is that American doctor who was held prisoner in the jungle.” [Hal Kushner, “the man who survived hell and came back alive.” Downstream The Vietnam War from PBS.]
    And she said, “Yes, he doesn’t get all ideological like so many of the personnel interviewed.”
    Later, in the kitchen, bent over the sink, I contemplated the Tupperware container we put peelings, banana skins, spoiled fruit, coffee grounds, and other compostables in. I used to believe that, at least theoretically, I could press this mass of vegetable matter tighter and tighter and not have to empty it into the composter out back for two or three weeks, or longer – until it approached being too heavy to carry. After all, don’t we read in books by cosmologists that all of the matter in the universe was originally a point of mass, until it exploded in a “big bang”?
    In actual practice, of course, even while I believed that, I had never succeeded in compressing the vegetable matter more than enough to extend for more than a day the time before I needed to empty the container; I emptied the container at least every other day.

    Yesterday morning I realized that I no longer believe, even theoretically, that matter can be recompressed appreciably – except by natural forces themselves, the same ones that brought about that big bang, the formation of galaxies, planets, plants, and animals...us.
    People today are as divided on public issues as vehemently as they came to be divided on the Vietnam War. People have always been divided on personal issues – like which god to pray to, or not? – whom to love, one’s own, or also strangers? – what to eat, other animals, or not? – who a patriot, he who extols his country right or wrong, or he whose country deserves constructive criticism?
    And individuals are themselves divided, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes another, sometimes actually embracing both sides…depending on the circumstance. I myself had been divided on the question of the compression of vegetable matter, if not vehement about it.
    Reflections on this latter point brought in mind the member of the blog staff who is “an avid proponent of bridging the perceived gap or schism between science and religion.” Later in the morning I emailed him, inviting him to submit something about bridging that gap, and suggesting that “the solution might be as simple as recognizing that humans are capable of being both religious and scientific.” What’s the big deal?

Copyright © 2017 by Moristotle